Quote

Writers feel like a middleman, standing with pen in hand over the page. A force greater than me stands above telling me what to write. That may sound romantic, but that's how it feels.

Neil Simon

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Neil Simon
Age: 91 †
Born: 1927
Born: July 4
Died: 2018
Died: August 26
Entrepreneur
Film Producer
Librettist
Lyricist
Playwright
Screenwriter
New York City
New York
Marvin Neil Simon
Like
Sound
Romantic
Force
Page
Write
Pages
Hands
Telling
May
Writers
Middleman
Feel
Standing
Middlemen
Feels
Hand
Pens
Writing
Greater
Stands

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Rewriting is when writing really gets to be fun. . . . In baseball you only get three swings and you're out. In rewriting, you get almost as many swings as you want and you know, sooner or later, you'll hit the ball.
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Talent is the gift plus the passion - a desire to succeed so intense that no force on earth can stop it.
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Sports is the only entertainment where, no matter how many times you go back, you never know the ending.
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I much prefer writing an original movie with the screen in mind to transferring a play to the screen.
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I love living. I have some problems with my life, but living is the best thing they've come up with so far.
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If you can go through life without experiencing pain you probably haven't been born yet.
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I don't want to restrict the life of a play to a particular production. The original actors might leave after the first six months, and I want the play to last 30 or 40 years. You write for the character, not the actor on the stage.
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It's always painful when you're writing memoirs because you've got to go through the dark places, but it gives you a chance to find out the person you really are, not the person you thought you were.
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If no one ever took risks, Michaelangelo would have painted the Sistine floor.
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Standing on a ledge again. Everyone laughs at dancing monkey with the typewriter. Not for long, though.
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The first book was my first attempt at writing full-length prose.
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It looks different when you're sober I thought I had twice as much furniture.
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I never write a play with an eye to film.
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Sudden money is going from zero to two hundred dollars a week. The rest doesn't count.
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Once you've opened yourself up, it's best to go all the way.
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All humor is based on hostility - that's why World War Two was funny.
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Gee, what a terrific party. Later on we'll get some fluid and embalm each other.
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I was constantly being dragged out of movies for laughing too loud.
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You get attached to the way you write, and I'm attached to notebooks. That's where I really write the plays. Just two or three pages at a time, then I transfer to the typewriter and rewrite while I type.
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I go to see plays all the time, and whenever I see Chekhov, I'm amazed at how this Russian play strikes home to me living 100 years later in New York City. I'm drawn to him because of his way with characters and their relationships with each other.
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